Fun

The 10x productivity narrative assumes AI has changed the equation. It has, but not where most people are looking. AI makes architected work faster; unarchitected work just fails faster.

The shift happened for me while debugging authentication across three platforms and three languages — two days of coordination compressed into an hour. From there it became a method: a workspace where the model sees the whole stack at once, MCP connections to the real database instead of guesses about it, and planning documents that get stress-tested, argued with, and revised right up until the feature ships. What the method still needs is someone who already knows what good output looks like.

It is 11:47 PM, I am debugging prod, and my two-year-old has just delivered a request for cold water containing nested clauses, exception handling, and a default fallback. I dropped my laptop. Not because I was tired, though I was.

What follows is the five-stage framework I have derived from watching Luna acquire language: the naming explosion, the possessive pronoun wars, the discovery of AND, the arrival of BUT ALSO, and the final form where because and however and even though all arrive at once. Each one maps onto something a junior developer does. Each one deserves celebration rather than correction. I am shaking, and I am writing a book about it.

The machine already worked fine on its native 68000, the built-in 1.3 ROM, and Workbench 1.3. That's charming from a historical perspective, but I never built the cable to get RGB into my odd Sony display, and I'd like something a bit newer under me before I start playing with old graphics software and drawing tablets.

So: a piStorm standing in for a much faster 68000, and an rgb2hdmi board sending video out over HDMI. Both are part of a whole world of Raspberry Pi projects for reviving retro computers, and I've barely scratched the surface of what they can do. Here's where things stand so far.

The animatronic skeleton I built for last Halloween worked, but only after a last-minute compromise: there wasn't enough memory to hold the animation sequences for both the songs and the patter, so I loaded the patter and left it at that. This year the skeleton is going to sing, which means loading the animation files on demand instead of all at once.

I also want to spend less of the night running sequences by hand, so there will be a jukebox mode that lets it perform without intervention. Last year's code is up on GitHub, and the first job is reworking that repo to clean it up and strip out the options I never ended up using.

Someday there will be a proper writeup, and probably a video. For now, a placeholder: an archived message from an Amiga BBS in which Joe Smith explains how he got a Sony KV-25XBR talking to an Amiga, after discovering that nobody at any computer store, any Sony dealer, or Sony customer service knew where to find the cable.

He bought the service manual, decided the official PX-34 connector was overpriced and the SMK-0001 cable a gamble, and wired up his own breakout box instead: a 9-pin Amiga video connector, six RCA jacks, and two switches for sync-on-green and TV audio. The full 34-pin and 9-pin pinouts follow, along with the reference links he gathered.

This one has been sitting since we moved into the house, and I've finally had time to get back to it. The plan was to run Kickstart 3.1 with an adapter board to make it play nicely with this revision of the motherboard, which got me a black screen at boot. Putting the 1.2 ROM back in got me a yellow screen instead, which is not much of an improvement.

Then, somehow, I zapped the machine and everything came up working. Strange, but I'll take it. The floppy drive tests fine, so what's left is sorting out the keyboard and building a cable for analog RGB.

I have the case of a Mac Cube sitting around waiting to become a Linux box, and I keep eyeing the 2013 trash can Power Macs going for almost nothing on eBay. There are a lot of fun weirdo machines out there, and the Macintosh's 40th anniversary seemed like a good excuse to round up my favorites.

Every machine here was manufactured and sold to the public, so no prototypes and no what-ifs. Together they show off Apple's inventive streak and its willingness to gamble on odd shapes and odd ideas. Weird is a matter of taste, of course, so if I've missed your pick, say so in the comments.

Triggers are one of those database features that feel like cheating the first time you use one. Write a little procedure, attach it to a table, and the database quietly does the work for you on every insert, update, or delete. No application code to remember, no forgotten call site.

That same quietness is the problem. A trigger you wrote months ago is invisible in the diff, invisible in the stack trace, and perfectly happy to keep running long after you stopped thinking about it. Here is where I have found them genuinely worth the trouble, where I now reach for plain application code instead, and what I wish I had known before letting the schema start making decisions on my behalf.

It’s coming up on October 31st again which means it’s time for our household to start building out our Halloween decorations. We enjoy Halloween in our neighborhood. There’s quite a few kids on our street and we get into the spirit.

Order placed July 2021. Delivery a year and a half later. Somewhere in between I switched my color to eruption green and dropped the tow package, and I have no regrets about either. The green is perfect.

Ford sent order holders a photo of their Bronco coming off the line, which was a nice touch for a wait that long. Also here: a goodbye to my Honda CR-Z, which carried me almost a decade and close to 100,000 miles and still felt pretty damn solid at the end. Thanks to Lief Johnson Truck City for making the handoff an easy one.